• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 24, 2024

Advertisers seem to have squandered large amounts of money in the first quarter of 2024. Some $1.4 billion was lost to mobile in-app ad fraud, per Pixalate’s estimates, but data shows budgets were also impacted in other media.

The company’s data-science team analyzed more than 19 billion global open programmatic advertising impressions across desktop and mobile web in Q1 2024 to compile this research. 

The invalid traffic (IVT) rate in Q1 2024 for the open programmatic desktop web ad marketplace rose to 12% -- up from 11% in Q4 2023, which dropped from 12% in Q3 2023.

The mobile market rose to 10% in Q1 2024 globally -- up from 9% in the previous quarter.

North America saw the highest rates at 15% and 11%, respectively. The U.S. and Argentina each had the highest IVT rate, 15%, for mobile-web open programmatic traffic in Q1 2024, according to Pixalate.

Apple had the second-highest IVT rate -- at 15% -- for traffic coming from its devices in the open programmatic mobile web ad marketplace in Q1 2024, followed by Vizio at 14, and Samsung at 14%.

Amazon -- the company with the lowest percentage measured by Pixalate in the report -- had 8%.

In another report, Pixalate's data-science team analyzed more than 94,000 connected television (CTV) apps, including non-open programmatic ad supported, and more than 3 billion global open programmatic advertising impressions in Q1 2024 to compile this research.

Data shows advertisers lost $528 million to connected television (CTV) ad fraud, per Pixalate. Some 30% of EMEA has the highest CTV IVT rate compared with any other global region, closely followed by APAC at 29% IVT for open programmatic CTV traffic in Q1 2024, as measured by Pixalate. North America had the lowest percentage at 12% -- down from 15% in the prior quarter.

The U.K. had the highest IVT rate at 30% for global CTV open programmatic traffic in Q1 2024, followed by Canada with 25% and Germany at 24%. The U.S. came in at 12% -- one of the lowest rates with the exception of Guatemala at 8% and Chile at 8%.

Xiaomi and Amazon Fire TV devices had the highest IVT rate --at 32% for each globally. Vizio came in at 23%, with Philips at 21%. Chromecast and Roku had the lowest rate, at 8% each, while Roku dropped from 14% in Q4 2023.

Amazon Fire TV apps had an IVT rate of 48% in Q1 2024 that do not have an app-ads.txt file detected, compared with the apps that have app-ads.txt file detected at 30%, per Pixalate’s data.